From the Aphorisms http://www.prevale.net/aphorisms.html page of the official website of Prevale
Original: (it) Ho costruito la fortezza del mio carattere con tutti i mattoni che mi hanno tirato addosso.
Source: Building Entopia - 1975, Chapter 23, The great dystopia of 1984, p. 298
From Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1 (1947/1991)
Context: Everything great and splendid is founded on power and wealth. They are the basis of beauty. This is why the rebel and the anarchic protester who decries all of history and all the works of past centuries because he sees in them only the skills and the threat of domination is making a mistake. He sees alienated forms, but not the greatness within. The rebel can only see to the end of his own ‘private’ consciousness, which he levels against everything human, confusing the oppressors with the oppressed masses, who were nevertheless the basis and the meaning of history and past works. Castles, palaces, cathedrals, fortresses, all speak in their various ways of the greatness and the strength of the people who built them and against whom they were built. This real greatness shines through the fake grandeur of rulers and endows these buildings with a lasting ‘beauty’. The bourgeoisie is alone in having given its buildings a single, over-obvious meaning, impoverished, deprived of reality: that meaning is abstract wealth and brutal domination; that is why it has succeeded in producing perfect ugliness and perfect vulgarity. The man who denigrates the past, and who nearly always denigrates the present and the future as well, cannot understand this dialectic of art, this dual character of works and of history. He does not even sense it. Protesting against bourgeois stupidity and oppression, the anarchic individualist is enclosed in ‘private’ consciousness, itself a product of the bourgeois era, and no longer understands human power and the community upon which that power is founded. The historical forms of this community, from the village to the nation, escape him. He is, and only wants to be, a human atom (in the scientifically archaic sense of the word, where ‘atom’ meant the lowest isolatable reality). By following alienation to its very extremes he is merely playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Embryonic and unconscious, this kind of anarchism is very widespread. There is a kind of revolt, a kind of criticism of life, that implies and results in the acceptance of this life as the only one possible. As a direct consequence this attitude precludes any understanding of what is humanly possible.
“Prisons are built with stones of law; brothels with bricks of religion.”
Source: 1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793), Proverbs of Hell, Line 21
I Am a Rock
Song lyrics, Sounds of Silence (1966)
Moncure Daniel Conway, in The Sacred Anthology (Oriental) : A Book of Ethnical Scriptures 5th edition (1877), p. 386; this statement appears beneath an Arabian proverb, and Upton Sinclair later attributed it to the Qur'an, in The Cry for Justice : An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest (1915), p. 475.
Misattributed
If you’re in tune with your story then the characters do come at you organically. There isn’t an order to how they might appear.
Source: On how she invests part of herself in her characters in “JESSICA HAGEDORN” http://www.tayoliterarymag.com/jessica-hagedorn in TAYO Literary Magazine
Dennis Hamill, New York Daily News (February 25, 2006) "Worth taking the risk", The Buffalo News, p. M09.
Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VIII, Sec. 16
